​Hello Readers!​Welcome to a continuation of my experience as a woman in engineering. If you haven’t already, please read “From Premed to Engineer” posted last month for more context on this topic. As a recap, I recently switched from Premed to Engineering, a decision that completely changed my college career. I mean completely changed. I went through my entire freshman year telling myself that the last thing I ever wanted to be was an engineer. And yet, here I am. And here are the things that I learned.

When I was first assigned to my engineering advisor halfway through my sophomore year, she met me when I was starting to give up and was looking for a fresh start in a new major. After taking my first engineering class, I was so surprised to find out I actually enjoyed it that I started to consider breaking down the mental walls that prevented me from becoming an engineer. It was hard. Right up to the minute I walked up to my advisor’s office (and to be honest, multiple times after the meeting), I kept doubting myself.

I’m not that great at math; actually, I don’t even like it. I’m not sticking to the plan of becoming a medical doctor that I set up for myself years ago. I’m already a year behind my engineering peers. I don’t know anyone in my major! And what about the gender gap that I’ve heard so much about? I don’t even know what it means to be an ‘engineer.’

Early on, those thoughts really prevented me from exploring engineering as a potential career. I tossed out the idea of being an engineer before I even considered it! If I were to give a single piece advice to anyone thinking about choosing a major, it would be to consider all options and break down mental barriers. I’m sure glad I did. I was unsatisfied with my education, and yearned for something different. I was desperate for something new, and that desperation led me to my advisor’s door with a Materials Science major declaration sheet in my hand.

It took a lot of courage to say—to even think—that maybe premed wasn’t right for me. However, I would say that it took even more courage to admit that my stereotyped and preconceived ideas about engineering prevented me from discovering a field that I enjoyed more than my premedical studies. It took a lot of courage to admit that I was premed for all the wrong reasons and that the only reason why I didn’t want to become an engineer was out of fear.

But I learned that it is a struggle worth having, and for the millionth time, I would tell anyone who is on the fence to struggle with yourself. That isn’t to say that my fears weren’t justified. In fact, I learned that (unfortunately), many of my fears about engineering were partially (if not entirely) true. It is true that I had to take a lot more math than what was required by my premed curriculum and that classes are more quantitative. It is true that I had to learn to depend on others and to discover what it means to be an effective team member. It is true that there are fewer women in engineering and that there inevitably were classes in which I could count all the females on one hand. It is true that there were times that I felt discouraged because I come from a low-income background.

BUT I learned that regardless of the intimidation and roadblocks that I would face due to my background and my inexperience, this was an opportunity. I realized that people would put me into certain categories: female, first generation, low income, etc. I got so bogged down by others’ labels I didn’t step back to realize that, really, they don’t matter. Being at Stanford certainly doesn’t make me impervious to judgment and profiling. It was important for me to realize that though those labels do represent a lot of my identity, I am also so much more.

I learned that my success is not limited to labels. I realized that not only can I become an engineer, but that I would. Those labels didn’t have to work against me. In fact, they motivate me to become better. Yes, most of my preconceived fears about engineering were true. And yes, I have and will continue to struggle in engineering due to these labels. But instead of being limited by them, I can expand upon those labels to describe myself more adequately. Here’s how:

I am a:

female….and I’m capable of anything

low income student….and I am a hard worker who is motivated by my past

minority student…and I have a vibrant cultural background that I am proud of

first generation student…and I am motivated to succeed by my parents, who have given up so much in this new country so that my future could be my own

inexperienced engineer…and I am excited about all the ways I can grow through learning about engineering’s potential in innovation

Not only are these expanded labels more accurate, but they are also labels of which I am proud. ​ On top of breaking free of the walls that labeling has set up, one of the more challenging things I had to learn was to work with others. I have always been independent in my studies and I am often intimidated to ask for others for help. College taught me that I should be a teacher’s pet and that there was no shortage of people who would help me if I asked. Since I had recently declared and literally knew no one else in the major, I really had to go out of my way to form study groups and make new friends. Everyone has a different schedule and a different way of approaching homework and projects, so I had to learn to work with them efficiently. Being the newbie in the major, I was not used to the Materials Science mindset and even the introductory material was occasionally difficult for me to wrap my head around. Though times like those were very discouraging, I found the support of my newfound friends and study groups essential. ​I learned that ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ are two different things. Though I was technically already declared as an engineer, I didn’t feel like an engineer. I am actually still learning what it means to be an engineer. Though under my name in my school’s electronic system was a label: Materials Science Engineering, I certainly had to learn to become one. From starting to think about pursing engineering to actually declaring as an engineer and starting my studies, I really had to go out of my comfort zone in order to ‘become’. I encourage you to do the same. Remember, you don’t have to be limited by stereotypes or by other people’s words. If you feel discouraged by labels, change them so that they can be labels that you are proud of.

​There is a certain line from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream that has really given me strength over the years, so much so that I actually have a necklace with this inscription that I carry around whenever I need a boost of courage: “Though she be but little, she is fierce.” Just as a side note for you readers out there, I am indeed ‘little’ (I’m 5’2). So be fierce. Strive not only to ‘be,’ but to ‘become.’

Dr. Gilda Barabino, the Dean of Engineering at City College of New York, was the keynote speaker at the Bioengineering Symposium, held at Penn last week. She received her PhD from Rice University in 1986 and was only the fifth African American woman to receive her PhD in Chemical Engineering. She is also the first African American female Dean of Engineering at a non-HBCU (historically black college and university) institution in the United States. Dr. Barabino is currently president of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES).

After eating lunch with Dr. Barabino and listening to her talk last week, I kept thinking about one thing she said: “Science is social.” I never thought of science or engineering as particularly social endeavors. When considering the humanities, social sciences, medicine, and business, science seems comparatively solitary. As a student, we go to class where we are talked at and we do problem sets to reinforce the material. Even with group projects and teams working on problem sets together, in the end you are the one taking the final exam. It is important to have confidence in your own ability to solve problems.

However, upon more reflection (and after listening to Dr. Barabino's talk again!) I realized two things: 1) The isolating aspects of science diminish significantly as a graduate student, post-doc, faculty member, or scientist in industry. There are no more formal tests to take. Instead, the important outcomes are research results, publications, talks, products, sales, patents, and impact on patients and customers. None of these are possible without a team of people working together. 2) As problems and questions in science and engineering become more complex, a single person, or even two or three people, is not enough to adequately tackle challenges.

Dr. Barabino expressed this point during her talk. “I think the level of collaboration is important. Our work, the science and technology; the level of sophistication, of intricacy, of complexity. These are all things that require multiple minds, multiple perspectives. The more we can work together in a collaborative fashion, the more we can push the field forward and make important discoveries. We [as bioengineers] think of ourselves as being interdisciplinary by nature. In our field we have to collaborate with others.”

Despite the need for interdisciplinary thought, certain factors remain that prevent the formation of strong cross-specialty collaborations. In the social science literature, “...they even talk about people being biased against interdisciplinary [work]. Some of this is because we are geared towards, 'Who is getting credit? Which field? Where are things coming from?'” This is another point I had not previously considered. Do people really care which field an idea emerges from? Apparently, the answer is yes.

In Ehud Shapiro's paper, published last year in eLife, he explains that, “Scientists who leave the safe haven of their home discipline to explore the uncharted territory that lies outside and between established disciplines are often punished rather than rewarded for following their scientific curiosity.” He goes on to explain that when scientists work at the boundary of two established disciplines, “There are no community elders to give guidance, to define and rank the important research goals, or to write recommendation letters to their intellectual offspring. There are no peers to compete with or use as reviewers; and there are no community-specific journals or conferences. In general, the intricate and encompassing community support structure present in dense scientific communities is completely missing.”

Even if these challenges of publication and acceptance by the larger community do not exist, collaborative work in itself requires a set of social skills. Dr. Barabino explained that, “In the literature, they also talk about social ties. If you ever wonder why a collaboration works really well, or sometimes it doesn't, there is the [aspect of] social ties. The more ties and social connections that you have, the more likely [it is that] the collaboration will work well. For faculty members, for example, if two faculty members are sharing co-advisement of students and sharing a grant and sharing a publication, the likelihood of that collaboration being stronger and lasting longer is much higher than if those ties didn't exist.”

However, as a newer discipline, bioengineering (or biomedical engineering) has a unique opportunity to celebrate interdisciplinary research. “One really fascinating thing about biomedical engineering as a discipline, [is that it's] newer and less mature than other engineering disciplines. It's not as stuck in its ways. It's already showing signs of being a much more inclusive, innovative discipline. It's ripe for the youth [coming into the field], and people already in the field, to make a difference and really stand out to be a model, not just for our field, but for other fields as well.” In addition to being a heavily collaborative field, Dr. Barabino has hopes for it to become a field that welcomes and nurtures individuals with a variety of backgrounds and interests.

When Dr. Barabino first entered the world of education, this was not the case. During her childhood, she experienced the “separate but equal” policies in schools she attended. As part of a military family, she typically attended integrated schools on military bases. But, in the third grade, she went to the town school. “There was an elementary school that was walking distance from our house, but we could not go because we were black. We had to walk out to a dirt road and get a bus and be bused several miles to the black school. And everyday that I walked by that white school, I would think, 'What is going on in there and why can't I go?' And the class we went to in the black school had old, dilapidated rooms, it was a very old building, the books were very old.” Even as a new PhD student at Rice University, in 1981, the engineering graduate student office did not believe she was a new graduate student. “When I showed up at Rice in '81, they thought I was in the wrong place! [My department] had never had a graduate student who was black.”

Due to her own experiences, Dr. Barabino explains that, “...I came to look at career progression in terms of factors that are interrelated at multiple levels. There are levels that affect us as individuals, there's social [levels], institutional type things that are involved, and policy implications.”

“There were things that I was observing in my own career and looking at other peoples' careers, how their careers went along a certain path, and I was convinced that there were factors beyond individual characteristics and capabilities that said a lot about how someone's career would progress. And I thought about the identity piece of it because we have a lot of identities...eventually we will see ourselves as a scientist or an engineer. And being able to work together across these different identities really makes a difference.”

This interest in identity led Dr. Barabino to read about research in career identity and eventually partake in such research herself. “There is this sense of self-concept, self-worth, self-efficacy. I was taken by this model that was done by [Heidi] Carlone and [Angela] Johnson. They are saying that there are dimensions of forming a science identity: performance, recognition, and confidence. The point that they made in their model is that you can be confident and perform well, but these two dimensions coming together may not result in you forming a science identity if you don't have recognition. And the recognition comes from not just you seeing yourself as a scientist or engineer, but when others see you as a scientist or engineer. This is part of the results of their study. [They found that] your identity as a scientist or engineer can be interrupted if there are not sufficient cases of external recognition.” Importantly, this external recognition cannot come solely from your parents, friends, or partner. It must come from established people in your area of work. Even if a person is quite talented, performs well, and is confident— it has been shown that without external recognition their ability to thrive in their chosen field is significantly reduced.

Despite these challenges, Dr. Barabino left us with ideas for implementing opportunities for recognition. “There are simple things you can do. You can recognize your peers. Sharing research and recognizing. Coming together as a community is really important. Science is social! We are not doing it all by ourselves. It's not just about the quantitative aspects. There are a lot of personal interactions that go on.”